


Touch

by startraveller776



Series: Lokane Bingo [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Friendship, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:35:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26786050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/startraveller776/pseuds/startraveller776
Summary: The first touch was her fist to his jaw, and she thought the last was when he pushed her out of the way of a Dark Elf bomb—until he showed up years later with a proposition she had trouble turning down. (Post-Endgame Canon Divergence AU)
Relationships: Jane Foster/Loki
Series: Lokane Bingo [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1953202
Comments: 22
Kudos: 123





	Touch

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** This was written in response to the prompt "Touch Starved" on my Lokane Bingo card (created by the wonderful Artemis_Day). I was also inspired by [this amazing artwork](https://stardust--and--magic.tumblr.com/post/629664805327912960) by stardust--and--magic. I hope you enjoy!

**TOUCH**

The first touch was her fist to his jaw. Jane glared at Loki, gritting her teeth against the pain splintering in her hand. His mouth stretched in a wide, dimpled smile that looked as though he actually meant what he said to Thor. _I like her_. Liar. Thor had told her what his villainous brother said in the Bifrost years ago. The threat against her. _Maybe when we’re finished here, I’ll pay her a visit myself._ He didn’t like her. And she despised him.

The second touch was his arm snaked around her waist, long fingers pressed against her stomach as he yelled at Malekith to come take his spoils. Number three came when he hovered over her, shielding her from Thor’s vain attempt to destroy the Aether, knee grazing the back of her thigh. Fourth—and final, she thought—was the palm of his hand shoving her out of the way of a bomb that almost took his life.

Nearly a decade later in an old church basement, Loki stood in a shadowed alcove, arms crossed, expression guarded during a support meeting for the Returned. That’s what the others called those who had disintegrated at the first Snap. Jane had been in her lab one day, reviewing the data her latest computer model had generated, and the next, she was in a post-apocalyptic world, her hand-built equipment collecting dust in a storage unit—at least, what had survived the twin wars against Thanos.

She’d heard of Loki’s futile attempt to stop the sociopathic alien who had callously condemned half of all life in the universe and called it a mercy. Stories came out of the Asgardian colony in Norway like a new Prose Edda, singing of his gallant sacrifice. The God of Mischief had become a hero in death.

She wasn’t surprised. He’d done it before.

And yet he was here, alive and well. Had his selfless demise been another illusion for the sake of his brother?

The group leader droned on about the challenges of reintegrating into a changed society, but Jane hardly heard a word, her eyes drifting to that dark corner. No one commented on Loki’s presence. Then again, in slacks and a button-down with sleeves rolled to his elbows, he looked nothing like the infamous destroyer of Manhattan he’d once been. Of course, his sins against humanity had been dwarfed by Thanos twice over.

When the meeting ended, when the others cleared the room in a hum of conversation and the clack of stacked chairs, she lingered behind. He stayed in the shadows, silently regarding her with an indecipherable gaze.

“What do you want?” she asked, letting her suspicion bleed into her tone.

He breathed a short, breathy laugh, more tired than amused. “I’m told these… _gatherings_ —” he said the word with a tang of disdain, “—are meant to help one adapt to this new reality.”

She gave him a flat look. “I’m pretty sure it’s going to take a couple thousand years of therapy to fix whatever is wrong with you.”

He pushed off the wall, closed the distance between them in slow, measured steps, and she stood her ground, chin tipped up in defiance despite the rapid thrumming of her heart. He shook his head, lips curving in a small grin. “So much reckless bravado in such a frail creature,” he murmured in a low voice. “I like it.” _I like her_.

She glowered at him in return.

He answered her question eventually, told her that he had no desire to remain trapped in this “meager realm”—though he didn’t expound on how he came to be here in the first place. He recalled that she’d once been intent on building a Midgardian version of the Bifrost, and would she be willing to venture a transitory partnership with him? She snorted at the way “partnership” fell from his tongue—as if the flavor of it was foreign and bitter.

“How can I trust you?” She crossed her arms, ignoring the hand he’d extended toward her.

A grin tugged briefly at the corner of his mouth. “You can’t,” he admitted plainly. “But you won’t let that stop you. I’m offering you a millenia’s worth of knowledge, and that is a bargain your insatiable curiosity cannot pass by.”

She wanted to deny it, wanted to tell him where he could stick his offer, but he was right. She’d eagerly lapped up the little information she could pry from Thor, but it was clear that of the two princes of Asgard, Loki was the scholar. With a sigh of resignation, she took his hand and gave it a hard shake, promising bodily harm if he didn’t hold up his end of the deal. He laughed at her impotent threat.

That was five.

Jane didn’t count the times her shoulder grazed his as they passed each other in the lab. They’d fought over where to set up shop. Loki had wanted to procure state-of-the-art facilities; she was adamantly against him throwing his weight around as a demigod. They compromised on an abandoned warehouse not far from her old stomping grounds in New Mexico. She didn’t question how he managed to find the equipment they needed so long as he swore no force was involved. She also didn’t question why she so readily believed the self-named God of Lies.

It was only the two of them. Darcy had survived the Snap, eventually moved on with her studies, and now was an associate professor at Duke on the tenure track. Jane kept in touch with her, but the years that passed in a mere blink for Jane had changed her former research assistant, enough that a quiet heaviness stretched between them whenever they spoke.

Erik had found a home at a mental health facility in Sweden. His mind had never quite recovered from the violent invasion of the Mind Stone, and Jane would never forgive Loki for it—a fact she made him aware of at the peak of a shouting match. It was late, they’d just had another test fail, and tempers flared. Differing opinions about methodology disintegrated into a salvo of increasingly vicious potshots. Touch six came when she aimed a hand at his face. He caught her wrist in an iron grip and bit out a chilling confession.

“What he’s suffered is nothing— _nothing_ —compared to the torture I endured!” Loki sucked in a breath, dropped her hand as if her skin seared him. “Blame me if you must, but you cannot call yourself righteous if you offer him your compassion and none to the one whose mind was just as stolen, regardless of which end of the scepter he held.”

He disappeared after laying that unsettling indictment at her feet. When he returned a week later, he sat next to her at the desk, picked up a printout from a stack, and began cataloging data. They worked in silence, pretending as if the blowout never happened, but his words stuck with her— _pricked_ at her. She couldn’t quite look at him the same way as before, as the devil she’d made a deal with. A necessary evil in her life.

Was he, though? Evil?

The shift, as tiny as it was, brought another revelation some weeks later: he was wary of physical contact. The first time she hugged him—touch six—after a successful attempt with their prototype, albeit brief, he stood rigid, arms at his sides. Her mind stored the stoniness in his features for future analysis when the high of accomplishment finally waned. She noticed, then, that while he regularly broached her personal space, while he towered over her as they furiously scribbled equations on the whiteboard, he never touched her. But then why should that surprise her? She knew how he felt about mortals, knew she was only a means to an end for him.

Loki started teaching her magic. Jane would never understand the workings of the Bifrost otherwise, he’d said, but she didn’t miss the smile ghosting across his mouth when she readily agreed. The lessons were grueling, though. It took nearly a month before she could sense the woven threads of what he called “seidr.” When she did, when—if she concentrated hard enough—a breathtaking, complex tapestry overlaid her field of vision, she embraced him again. (Seven.) This time his hands came up, briefly resting against her back before she retreated.

“Sorry,” she said. Why was her face on fire? She’d never worried about offending him before. Still, she felt compelled to add, “I know you don’t like that.”

He stared at her with those unfathomable eyes, brows drawing downward, but he made no reply.

Eight through twenty-three happened the same way, impulsive celebrations with every milestone they crossed in building a wormhole generator, with every little mastery she gained over magic. He didn’t resist her enthusiasm, but returned her embrace, less tentatively each time, leaning into her and holding on a hairsbreadth longer than before. It was almost normal. She began to forget the maniacal god who’d once been bent on world domination, the bitter, wayward son of Odin consumed with jealousy and hatred. She forgot, even, that he was more than an infuriating, brilliant lab partner.

Until S.H.I.E.L.D. showed up on their doorstep.

In retrospect, Jane should have anticipated their appearance. The covert agency thought they had rights to anything they deemed dangerous to the safety of the planet, including her work— _again_. Including Loki.

With a snarl, the latter had stepped forward outside their make-shift lab, his casual attire melting into full leather armor, complete with horned helmet and cape. He gripped a pair of daggers, and with an air of dismissal, glanced at the semi-automatic weapons of their uninvited guests.

“Don’t be so confident,” Agent Coulson warned. “We’ve made a few upgrades.”

Loki let out a laugh rasping with menace. “Shall we try them, then? See if you’ve produced something that can stop a god?” He advanced a step. “Do your worst. I can assure you that whatever I lack, it isn’t _conviction_.”

Jane didn’t know the significance of his statement, but a shadow fell over Coulson’s face just as surely as if Loki had tossed a spark at an unseen powder keg before the other man.

“Stop,” she said, putting herself between the two of them.

Coulson spoke to her as if coaxing a skittish animal, promising that S.H.I.E.L.D. could undo whatever influence Loki had on her, that they would protect her, protect her research—so long as she stood aside. Loki answered in growling threats, swearing to eviscerate anyone who dared to lay a finger on her.

Her. Not him.

Her brain tripped on that little detail for a heartbeat. But then Coulson and his crew advanced an inch, looking terribly trigger happy as they adjusted their aim on Loki. She didn’t have to turn around to know that the former villain behind her was making ready to unleash the chaos and mayhem that lived inside of him.

But she did turn around, ignored the disturbingly feral expression on his face, and placed a hand on his smooth cheek. (Twenty-four.) He looked down at her, brows knitting together in bemusement, in wariness until she gave him a smile.

“Help me make it all go away,” she murmured.

He hesitated a beat, glancing over her head at Coulson as though uncertain he was ready to give up the opportunity to best his adversary, but then, mouth blossoming in a wide, dimpled grin, he vanished his daggers and curled his fingers around hers.

Her sight was suddenly dual with his touch—twenty-five, or was it still twenty-four?—vibrant color that was so _alive_ woven over a duller reality. Was this how Loki saw the tapestry of seidr? Her novice glimpses were desaturated ghosts in comparison.

“Do you see?” he asked in hushed tones.

At first she didn’t, distracted by warnings Coulson shouted. How oddly distant he sounded. But then— _yes_. She reached toward a verdant thread and tugged. At the same time, Loki stretched his arm, catching the glistering filament and weaving it through different stitches in the tapestry. She watched him work with awe, though the scientist in her could not be entirely quelled as she hastily made mental notes.

Coulson cursed. Yelled at his men open fire, but their bullets flew harmlessly into the barren wasteland now before them. Jane and Loki had sewn themselves and their lab up in what he called a void keep—the same way he stored his knives, his armor, and who knew what else. (She’d argued that a better name for it was an interdimensional pocket. He’d sardonically asked why she clung to such banal, inelegant terms.)

S.H.I.E.L.D. agents swarmed the area, and Jane unconsciously held her breath as they passed through her and Loki, crossed through the walls of the warehouse. Coulson stood, hands on his hips, shaking his head.

“Pull the knot tight,” Loki said when the pocket was complete, guiding her hand with touch twenty-six.

She stopped counting when he kissed her.

It was after Coulson yelled himself hoarse, promising that he’d find them. After all but two agents left in the black Suburbans that had conveyed them here. After Jane dashed inside the lab to transcribe the notes she’d taken in her head. After Loki stepped up behind her, armor replaced once more with his usual attire of button-down and slacks.

He gently took the pencil out of her hand mid-notation, and she made a noise of protest as he spun her by the shoulders to face him.

“What?” she asked with impatience. She needed to get everything down before memory warped and faded.

His lips parted and then they were on hers, his fingers knotting in her hair. He inhaled, he drank, he devoured, and she’d never felt so singularly desired, so desperately _needed_ before. Her previous experiences had been quiet, mutually beneficial arrangements. Even what she once—twice—shared with Thor was tame enough that he could leave her for the sake of Asgard first time, that she could leave him the second time to answer the clarion call of science while his commitments pulled him ever toward the Avengers.

Loki, though… Loki staked an immutable claim on her with his mouth at the curve of her neck, with his bruising fingertips as he gripped her hips and set her on the desk. She’d always thought women who fantasized about being thoroughly possessed were weak-willed. But she understood it now when he lifted his head, pale eyes consuming her as though there was nothing in the universe he wanted more.

This wasn’t weakness. This was _power_.

Afterward in her bed, he enveloped her with long limbs in a silent proclamation. _Mine_. She might have argued the point, except it meant, too, that he was hers. In recent weeks, she’d ignored the bilious churning of her stomach when she remembered the ephemeral nature of their agreement. He’d become so expertly grafted into her life, the only constant in a world she no longer recognized, that the notion of one day parting ways was becoming hard to swallow.

Work on the generator slowed exponentially. Loki had overcome his aversion to physical contact with single-minded enthusiasm and seemed determined to make up for lost time. Jane found she could be enticed away from her work with the right diversion—a novelty she never would have guessed possible. Funny how it was with the being she’d once vowed to hate as long as she drew breath.

Heated arguments blossomed occasionally between them as before, sometimes crumbling into sputtering vitriol, and he’d disappear. But never for more than a day. Her mattress would dip at night with his weight as he wordlessly gathered her into his arms. She curled against him without resistance, offering her unspoken apology in return for his.

This wasn’t love. It was familiarity. Comfort. And yet, his smiles became less a weapon of mockery, her laughter less serrated. She was surprised the first time he recounted a memory from his childhood without biting invectives for his adoptive parents, without an abject hatred toward his brother—though an undercurrent of envy still tinted his words. It was a silly tale of stealing an airship, flying it through the great hall and eventually crashing it into a pillar.

“Like when we were escaping Asgard,” Jane said with a whispered laugh. “All those columns. That statue.”

An unreadable look flashed across Loki’s gaze before he gave her a small grin. “Indeed.”

This wasn’t love, but then he stared at her with an uncharacteristically soft expression and murmured, “I understand now.”

“What?” she asked.

He didn’t answer, only leaned down to take her mouth in a kiss with a new kind of longing—as if he wanted more than her body. As if he wanted her heart. Her pulse stuttered as she slid quaking hands up his chest. Because it was too much and everything. Because she was afraid she’d already given it to him without knowing, bit by tiny bit.

He revealed his affection in increments as well. With an unfettered reverence peeking through his fractured mask of indifference. With murmurs of “exquisite” and “perfection” as he mapped a new path to paradise on her skin. With a sighed wish when he thought she was asleep.

“If only the Allfather had banished me instead of Thor…”

This was love. And Jane wanted to live in these moments indefinitely.

But the clock was winding down. Coulson’s agents were never far, every so often testing some new device or another on the area where the lab should be. The thread of seidr she and Loki had woven to protect their home tugged against the knot holding it in place. Loki explained that the larger the void keep, the more tenuous its permanence. He’d never crafted one this size before.

They worked on the generator in earnest, and she fell asleep late each night listening to him describe the wonders he planned to show her. Neither spoke of the lost Realm Eternal. He didn’t talk of Jotunheim either; she didn’t press him, though the unnatural coolness of his flesh kept it close in her thoughts.

When the generator was finally complete, Jane wanted to cry tears of frustration. They couldn’t sustain a viable wormhole for more than a second or two, and she’d examined every screw and circuit board, every wire, every metal plate. It should work. Why didn’t work?

But as she combed through the data from their latest failure, she suddenly knew. “It doesn’t have enough power.”

“Yes.” Loki stood with his back to her, his eyes on the agents who were doing another frenzied search of the area. The interdimensional pocket could hide the lab, but not the wormhole.

“No,” she said, emotion cracking in her voice. “You don’t understand. What it needs is equivalent to—” she did a quick calculation, “—at least three nuclear power plants running at full capacity!”

“Yes, I’m aware.”

“We can’t create power like that out of thin air!” Too caught up in the futility of their year-long pursuit, she didn’t see at first the sagging of his shoulders, the dipping of his head before he turned to face her.

He held her gaze, strain sharpening the geometric lines in his face. A beat of weighted silence passed, then another before he spoke. “We can.”

He closed his eyes and lifted his hand. The air in the lab became thick, unbreathable when a cube appeared on his fingertips, glowing in brilliant cerulean. She recognized the Tesseract from her brief period working with S.H.I.E.L.D.—when she had the clearance to access their research.

A dozen different questions raced through her mind, but the one that leapt to the forefront was, “If you had that, why bother building a wormhole generator?”

“There are…consequences to using an infinity stone directly,” he said. “Something I believe you understand intimately.”

She shivered, rubbing at her arms as she pushed away the memory of the Aether’s possession of her. The unsettling visions. The way it seemed to feed off of her—physically, mentally, _emotionally_ —like a parasite. The way a part of her still disturbingly craved that power. “But _how_ do you have the Tesseract? Thanos killed you and took it—”

“He didn’t.”

“Well, yeah. Clearly.” She gestured toward Loki in exasperation. “I don’t know how you faked that, but—”

“No, Jane.” Loki stepped toward her, set the cube on the scattered stacks of paper at a nearby desk. “The Loki you speak of did die at Thanos’s hands. I’m simply not him.”

Not him? Jane shook her head as disquiet stirred in her middle. How could he not be Loki?

He answered her question before she could form it aloud. “I escaped with the Tesseract before Thor could return me to Asgard in shackles, and it brought me to this desolate reality,” he said. “I’m afraid a vestige of the Mind Stone’s influence had an unexpected effect on my ability to wield its cousin.”

She backed away, heartbeat catching when her rear bumped against a rolling chair. What he was saying, that he was a Loki from an alternate reality, was frightening. It was one thing to believe in the possibility of parallel universes; it was another to be faced with absolute evidence of it.

“You never struck my face,” he continued, matching her retreat, “in retribution for my near successful attempt at dominating your meager world. I never traveled with you and Thor to the obsidian sands of Svartalfheim to save you from the Aether and stop Malekith. I never ruled the Realm Eternal as my accursed father or started the prophesied Ragnarok to save its people from Hela. I never martyred myself at the altar of a monster far more mad than I have ever been.”

Loki paused, a single tear slipping down his cheek as he gave her a brittle smile. “Oh, I well know the stories of the vaulted _other_.” His words were splintered, sour.

Jane blinked at the stinging in her eyes, swallowed the lump growing in her throat. “Everything was a lie?”

He breathed a mirthless laugh. “I did warn you that you couldn’t trust me when we first met.” His expression sobered. “But _was_ everything a lie, Jane? Did you not give your body, your devotion to me? Did I not give you all in return?”

He cupped her jaw, thumb tracing the path her own tear had fallen with such aching gentleness. “What does any of this change between us? You are mine. You’ve never been his.”

Betrayal and love warred inside of her. He’d lied, let her count those first four touches as if they had belonged to him too. He was right. What were four compared to the hundreds of the last few months? Who had held her, regaled her with stories of his mischievous youth? Who knew the spot just below her ear that lit her up like Tesla’s oscillator? Not the demigod she’d nearly broken her fist punching a lifetime ago.

What did this Loki’s confession change? Nothing that mattered.

She socked him in the chest, as hard as she dared without damaging the fine bones in her hand. “That’s for lying.”

The corner of his mouth tipped up, dimple making a line in his handsome face, though she didn’t miss the relief that flitted across his gaze. “You’ve no sense of self preservation at all.”

She smiled back at him. “Just the way you like it.”

She pulled him down to her, and the heated kiss that followed was another new one. Because his mouth moved against hers as the man he was rather than the man he’d been pretending to be. Because the final barrier between their souls had fallen.

Hours later, with hands entwined, they stepped into a portal swirling with a kaleidoscope of color.

(Touch number unknown of infinity.)

**~FIN~**

**Author's Note:**

>  **A/N:** Thank you so much for reading! If you have a moment, I'd love to hear your thoughts!


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